The European Space Agency (ESA) intends to launch Vega launch vehicle with the Intermediate Experimental Vehicle (IEV) this year to develop the satellite reentry technology, ESA chief Jean-Jacques Dordain told a press conference in Paris on Friday. The press conference was broadcast live at the Moscow office of the ESA Permanent Mission to Russia.

The takeoff of Vega launch vehicle with IEV is scheduled for the second half of 2014, he specified.

In his opinion, the scientific highlight of the year will be the rapprochement of Rosetta spacecraft with the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet after a 10-year flight. The European space 'scout' is to approach the comet and send an 85-kilo module to it that should define the parameters of the comet's nucleus and study its chemical composition. That will happen in November 2014.

In the framework of the European Copernicus program of monitoring the Earth from space the first Sentinel-A spacecraft is prepared for launch in 2014.According to Dordain, three launches under the Galileo program will permit introducing the European global positioning system by the end of the year.

He said that two ESA astronauts will work on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2014 - Alexander Gerst (Germany) and Samantha Cristoforetti (Italy).

In 2014 ESA also plans to launch the fifth and final ATV to ISS. Dordain said no more ATV vehicles would be made but the technical headway made in the process of their development would be used by European experts in developing the service module of the future U.S. spacecraft Orion.

Source: Voice of Russia